Sunday Musings w/ Shore Branding – 2/17/13

Here are the links and stories that caught my attention in digital marketing and branding this week. As mentioned in the first Sunday Musings entry last week, we’ll be updating this section each week with stories that caught my attention and found to be of particular interest.

Premise: LinkedIn went over the 200 million user mark recently and they sent out notifications to the top 1%, 5%, and 10% most viewed profiles in 2012. Their strategy of sharing this news across the web and with others seems to have been a success, as this was one of many articles written up about the initiative.

Thoughts: The writer of this particular link/article went through a similar set of emotions and thoughts that I had earlier this week when I received the email from LinkedIn saying that I was in the top 10% as well. Was it spam, how many people does this actually consist of, and then admiration that LinkedIn was creating a good amount of buzz for their site. I would assume this will now be an annual tradition for the site moving forward. Here is the infographic that LinkedIn provided with the email that illustrates some of the more basic stats for their site.

Premise: Mashable provides some interesting perspective on how and where viewers tend to look on a number of social media / digital web sites through eye tracking.

Thoughts: I almost didn’t click on this due to the title and thinking it was only about Facebook. However, I’m fascinated by eye tracking testing and where people are going/looking when they get to a web site. Open up the gallery towards the bottom of the article to see the eye tracking results across a number of popular SM sites, including; Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Klout, etc.

Premise: Copyblogger puts together a number of recommendations and thoughts on how to use Google+, along with the overall recommendation that you should use G+. The article includes an in depth infographic at the end for your consideration.

Thoughts: Interesting thoughts and ideas here from the copyblogger.com team. I tend to agree with a lot of their thoughts, including how to share, leverage G+’s Circles, linking your blog, etc. While I have not used G+ too much as a personal web site in the mold of Facebook, I find the content in the Communities and the ability to speak to specific people through Circles to be tremendous assets for the site. The Hangouts feature is still just at the cusp of what it can be and what it can become in the business world.

Premise: Earlier this week President Obama gave his State of the Union speech. The Republican response to the speech was given by Florida Senator, Marco Rubio. During the latter’s speech, there was a Twitter storm due to Rubio’s need to reach for a drink of (Poland Spring) water several times. This could have been an excellent time for someone on the Poland Spring team to log into their Twitter account and jump in on the fun to promote their brand, but they failed miserably.

Thoughts: This is one of my biggest pleas with companies, if you aren’t going to use a site consistently to get your message out there, why bother signing up or post anything at all? I could understand wanting to grab the page/name itself, but to post for some time and then just give up is another thing. At the time of this writing, Poland Spring hasn’t tweeted since 7/26/10. This was a tremendous opportunity for Poland Spring to get out in front of the action as it was happening and capitalize on it.

After Rubio’s speech, his team must have seen the news that this was creating and tweeted the following – a second, golden opportunity for Poland Spring to capitalize on!

Premise: Amex continues to strengthen its digital presence with the announcement that consumers can now tweet specific hashtags and buy products on Twitter. The early partnerships with Amex include Amazon, Sony, Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Bracelet, and Xbox. All you have to do is sync your Amex card to your Twitter account and you are all set to start purchasing through the site.

Thoughts: Continuing to invent new means through the purchase channel on digital channels has been a real strength for Amex relative to their direct competitors. This is another great idea for trial. My one concern is the ease of how people can likely tweet the key words and then claim they didn’t mean to or want to do so or that they were just ‘fooling around’. This really just comes down to user self-discipline. Overall, I think this is a great idea and has the potential to grow with more partners.

What do you think? Did any of these particular stories grab your attention as well? If so, why? Let me know if the comment section below.

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